The temper of our time:
The world turned upside down

In light of all this, the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978
Harvard commencement address resonates hauntingly today. "What is the joy
about?" he challenged. He admonished us that, "...the most striking
feature in the West today is the decline in courage. The Western world has lost
its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government,
in each political party and of course in the United Nations. Political and
intellectual functionaries proudly exhibit self-serving rationales as to how
realistic, reasonable and even morally justifiable it is to base policies on
weakness and cowardice..."

The truth of the matter is that he was frighteningly right. The
United Nations, the Nobel Foundation and all the other keystones of
civilization are failing as testing agents of human decency. The crucibles in
which enduring human values must be generationally re-forged are growing cold.
The flames flicker out. The anvils on which we hammered out justice, are slowly
being cast aside.

In their absence swords cannot be turned into plowshares. Our best
hopes for civility and civilization are dragged down to the lowest points of
discredit by debasement and evil run rampant. And the sublime prophecy which
graces the entrance to the United Nations that "...nation shall not lift
up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore..." rings
out as hollow as lost hope.

~ The Temper of Our Time

When British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to the
Americans at Yorktown, Virginia on Oct. 19, 1781 ending the Revolutionary War,
he ordered his military band to play an old English tune called "A World
Turned Upside Down" as his army passed in salute in front of George
Washington's forces. The name of that old English song is an apt description of
the temper of the times we live in today.

Not much should surprise us anymore as we have become so immersed
in the smug, self-satisfied double standards that allow us to wrap ourselves in
comfortable cloaks of political correctness while ignoring the stark reality of
the moral bankruptcy that surrounds us. Yet there are still events that should
shock us out of our reveries and make us realize that if we accept the current
human condition without protest or contest then each of us will be judged
complicit in the degeneration to a world citizenry without character, existing
in societies that dare not care, ruled by leaders who can no longer tell right
from wrong.

One such event took place last week. The Nobel Committee awarded the
2005 Peace Prize to the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency and its
director-general Mohammed El-Baradei. To paraphrase Churchill, rarely has so
much been given to so few for so little.

The IAEA was set up in 1956 to control the proliferation of
nuclear weapons. The Nobel Foundation praised the IAEA and Dr. El-Baradei
"for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military
purposes." The Nobel citation went on to add that the selection committee
had become preoccupied by "the struggle to diminish the significance of
nuclear arms in international politics," a goal toward which it admits,
"the world has achieved little." The sheer hypocrisy of this addition
to the international community's bodyguard of lies about the United Nations
leaves one breathless.

As a department of a world body two-thirds controlled by despotic
regimes, the IAEA is perhaps singularly responsible for the spread of weapons
of mass destruction and "dirty" bombs into the hands of rogue and
failed states under the legitimization of the UN itself.

On Iran, the IAEA did nothing when its inspectors were barred from
weapons-development sites even in the face of Iranian admissions that it had weapons-grade
plutonium. In violation of international agreements, Iran possesses hundreds of
uranium-enriching centrifuges that can only be used in the manufacture of
offensive armaments. The IAEA's reaction has been an agreement to submit this
issue to the Security Council at "some future date".

On Iraq, the IAEA did nothing from the time Saddam first announced
he would be building a nuclear power plant in 1974. Even after Israel took out
the Osirak reactor, Iraq continued to operate a nuclear weapons program that continued
until the American invasion. Both El-Baradei and his predecessor Hans Blix, who
visited the nuclear sites and called them "research facilities", had
the temerity to praise Iraq's co-operation in the 1990's as "exemplary"
even though several nuclear sites were found and destroyed by coalition forces
in the Gulf War. After the War, the IAEA declared Iraq's nuclear program
"totally dormant". Again these lies were disproved when an Iraqi
general in charge of the program defected to the West in 1995 and he confessed
to having led a "crash program," post-war, to restore Iraq's nuclear
weapons capability. Not surprising that former chief UN weapons inspector Sir
Richard Butler, who resigned in disgust with the world body, once intimated
that Blix was Saddam's favourite UN representative.

On Libya, the IAEA did less than nothing when Khaddafi revealed in
2003, years after El-Baradei's ascension as director-general, that he had been running
a nuclear weapons program for some 20 years. The IAEA was caught completely
with its pants down since it had not once even looked into that outlaw nation
nor mentioned the butcher of Lockerbie in its reports.

On North Korea, the IAEA sent back glowing reports from 1994 to
2002 until it was revealed that the agency's inspectors were looking at the
wrong sites. The UN finally appointed a special envoy for nuclear talks with
the Stalinist regime some twenty months ago. That envoy, Canada's Maurice Strong,
was forced to resign earlier this year when his ties to Saddam Hussein in
Cordex Petroleum and his dealings with South Korean businessman and some-time
international arms dealer Tongsun Park came to light.

On Pakistan, the IAEA has said not a word on the "nuclear supermarket" run by
A. Q. Khan, the "merchant of menace" as TIME magazine called him in a
cover story, who sells plans and components to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control once declared that
the IAEA "had an unsurpassed record of failure" on nuclear arms
control. That is the most eloquent epitaph for that body.

But Mohammed El-Baradei has some interesting baggage of his own.
He has for years played a critical role in undermining any censure of Iran
saying that as long as Israel has nuclear capabilities, it would be " < http://www.iris.org.il/blog/exit.php?url_id=3617&entry_i d=404>
hypocritical to condemn" others. He has actually been quoted as saying
that "the jury is still out on whether the Mullahs want the bomb."
This was at the same time that Mohammed Ghannadi, second in charge of the
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told the Tehran Times in October of last
year that the Isfahan uranium conversion facility "... is 70 percent
operational right now,"

In March of 2004 El-Baradei told the Security Council that
documents that demonstrated Iraq tried to procure uranium from Niger were crude
forgeries. Well it turned out, as reported in London's Daily Telegraph, that
Iraq had a longstanding procurement arrangement for yellow-cake from Niger and El-Baradei
was either purposely lying or simply did not want to know.

And after the American invasion of Iraq, in the midst of the WMD
debate, El-Baradei admitted that up to the time of the invasion, and despite
all the words of praise by the IAEA for Iraq's "co-operation", Iraq
had failed to account for 6,500 bombs which could carry up to 1,000 tonnes of
chemical agent, or for 8,500 litres of biological warfare agent and a large
amount of growth media which could be used to produce about 5,000 litres of concentrated
anthrax. But for some reason all this testimony never made the front page of
The New York Times.

El-Baradei is a classic apologist for those who not only subscribe
to the bankrupt notions of moral relativism and political equivalency, but who
also defend to all our deaths the right of rogue states to be wrong as they stagger
drunkenly in their fruitless attempts at "nation-building". Writing in
the New York Times he stated "We must abandon the unworkable notion that it
is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction,
yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security - and indeed to
continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use."

Presumably we must take from this that until the big powers lay
down their arms, we should just be lenient with any lunatic fringe regime that
wants the same toys. And in another commentary of his, we could reasonably conclude that this would include
the theocratic tyrannies who seek to impose their will on the great
"satans" of the world.

Writing in the Cairo Times El-Baradei had the gall to place the
blame for the failure to curtail nuclear proliferation on every Middle Eastern
tinpot dictator's favorite whipping boy...Israel. He stated that, "I think
we need to continue working hard on developing a nuclear weapons free zone in
the Middle East. That zone must include Israel. At its root, non-proliferation in
the Middle East is inextricably linked to peace between Israel and Palestine."

What sophomoric sophistry to link the offensive aggressive
ambitions of states like Iran, Iraq and Libya to the defensive security
concerns of the only free nation in the Muslim Middle Rim of this small planet.
And this man shares a Nobel Prize for Peace.

But what can we really expect from someone who started his career
serving Nasser's regime in 1964. Fought in the Egyptian army against Israel in
both the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And just last year
leaked the fake "October Surprise" letter meant to blame Bush's
policies for "missing" Iraqi weapons in an attempt to bolster support
for John Kerry in the U.S. Presidential elections.

In light of all this, the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978
Harvard commencement address resonates hauntingly today. "What is the joy
about?" he challenged. He admonished us that, "...the most striking
feature in the West today is the decline in courage. The Western world has lost
its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government,
in each political party and of course in the United Nations. Political and
intellectual functionaries proudly exhibit self-serving rationales as to how
realistic, reasonable and even morally justifiable it is to base policies on
weakness and cowardice..."

The truth of the matter is that he was frighteningly right. The
United Nations, the Nobel Foundation and all the other keystones of
civilization are failing as testing agents of human decency. The crucibles in
which enduring human values must be generationally re-forged are growing cold.
The flames flicker out. The anvils on which we hammered out justice, are slowly
being cast aside.

In their absence swords cannot be turned into plowshares. Our best
hopes for civility and civilization are dragged down to the lowest points of
discredit by debasement and evil run rampant. And the sublime prophecy which
graces the entrance to the United Nations that "...nation shall not lift
up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore..." rings
out as hollow as lost hope.

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